The Process Element - Part 5

Unicon is publishing an article on ways of approaching decision-making about adopting cloud and/or managed services. The article is broken down into segments. The segments cover elements including: strategic, financial, architecture, security, process, and people.

We continue the series this week by publishing the process segment of the article.

The Process Element

The cloud decision process should include an examination of the internal IT processes used to deliver services today along with the anticipated changes that will result from a migration. Typical processes that should be considered are change management, service management (including incident and problem management and service metrics), service monitoring and alerting, capacity planning, and budget planning/tracking.  Understanding the provider's processes early on is important – does the provider's standard and emergency maintenance processes fit with existing service commitments or will these need to be adjusted?  What transparency into change management, problem management, post-incident review and root cause analysis is available from the provider?  If the existing stakeholders are accustomed to high levels of operational transparency, consider whether the cloud environment under consideration supports those levels of transparency or not.  If not, early dialog with the service stakeholders will help reduce the level of surprise when something does inevitably go wrong.

Please check back next week for the last segment of this article, which will cover the people element.